At MMS 2011 in Las Vegas, the next version of Opalis was announced.
The product is called "System Center Orchestrator 2012"
Adam Hall has published a first look of this which gives a good overview of what to expect!

Hello Everyone In the last few weeks, I have been working with Opalis, the new player in the System Center Suite. A lot of the configuration wizards/gui, and documentation have not been easy at all. Some parts of opalis is very hard to setup, and requires a lot of reading and manually changing files/downloading files etc. Especially the Opalis Operator's Console, which is a web based console for monitoring the status, or running Opalis Runbooks (Policies). This console in running on a java webserver with a lot of different jboss .jar files and other components needed. I tried to [...]

Many people who have worked with PowerShell have reached this problem. You have a exe file in a folder that includes spaces. (fx. "C:\Program Files\")
This exe file needs to be called with an argument that starts with "-". at the same time , you need to call it from another folder.

In my previous post I blogged about migrating collections from ConfigMgr. 2007 to ConfigMgr. 2012. This post will focus on some of the great collection changes you will see in ConfigMgr. 2012. First a quick recap of the new features: There are separate collections for Users and Devices. You can’t mix objects the two objects in the same collection anymore. There are two top collections, All Systems and All Users. Those collections can’t be deleted. All collections must be limited to another collection. Linked collections do not exist any longer. Sub collections do not exist any longer. Collections are part [...]

One thing that a lot of ConfigMgr. admins has spent hours on, is the collection design in CM2007 (or they should have spent the hours). When designing collections in CM2007 some of the design challenges were: Not being able to create folders. Not being able to easily include or exclude objects from other collections. Configure security on collection to a certain ConfigMgr. admin group. In this post I will walk you thru what happens to some of your collections when you perform a collection migration. Before you start the migration, you need to know about the new collection rules in [...]

You may have noticed that it sometimes take quite some time to delete a virtual machine from within the Hyper-V console. It can take hours in some cases. This happens if the virtual machine has snapshots and it is by design. What actually happens when you delete the virtual machine is that the snapshot(s) is being merge into the VHD file and then the virtual machine is deleted from the Hyper-V console. I have created a virtual machine and installed Windows Server 2008 R2. It is just a basic install. After the install I created a snapshot while the virtual [...]

Now its time to use a vbs script to ensure that all services are stopped and started in the correct way – so if any services are dependent on other they will be restated as well. First Create a new task from your Console: Let it be an Agent Tasks and Remember the Management Pack: Give it a Name and a Target like this: Add a Parameter – either your Service shortname or a text like this: Press [OK] and [Create]. Choose a server and [Restart a Services and its dependencies] When running te task you need to create a [...]

If you need to restart a service with a Task, you can create a Task like this: Use either a command file or an vbs script – this sample shows using a command shell file with this content: And at the end you could run it from your Computer State View.

Have you ever thought on creating Alerts directly from a mail? Or Send a mail to your OpsMgr to raise an alert in your Operations Manager? A few weeks ago I was talking with a guy participating on one of the Advanced OpsMgr courses, his existing monitoring environment currently delivered an mail to a group mailbox in which they used to react and resolve issues from a Nagios/IPMonitor installation. But what he really would like to was gather all issues in the Operation Manager Console, after a quick talk with Jakob Svendsen https://blog.ctglobalservices.com/jgs/outlook-2010-auto-export-body-of-new-e-mails/ he came up with a “How To” [...]

In Configuration Manager 2007 most of the client agents settings you can configure are site wide except for a few such as Policy Polling interval and restart settings. These two can be configure on a collection basis – but that is it. But here comes Configuration Manager 2012 to the rescue – You can now create Custom Client Settings and assign them to a collection. The Default Client Agent Settings are applied across the network and are site wide in nature. You simply select the settings you want in your “custom settings object” by ticking the checkbox next to [...]

If you are one of the guys who unfortunately live in other countries than an english spoken one – you could have problems with defining your SLA on e.g. a distributed application. But try to Log in on your RMS with the service account and change regional setting to your locale, and then you should be able to define SLA with commas…. ,,,, Have a great day…

Need to see all your Agents and the Install date / time – run this query – or download the report and import it. SELECT Path, InstallTime FROM BaseManagedEntity INNER JOIN MT_HealthService ON BaseManagedEntity.BaseManagedEntityID = MT_HealthService.BaseManagedEntityId Where InstallTime > ‘2009-21-02’ And a Report file, if you want to deliver your Operations Manager Administrators the nice view:

The PXE Service Point is no longer a separate site system role in Configuration Manager 2012. Instead it is a function of the Distribution Point Role. In the Distribution Point Role Properties, you can find the PXE tab and you have the same configuration options as you did in Configuration Manager 2007 You can configure/setup the PXE Service Point in Configuration Manager 2012 in the following ways: Select the Enable PXE service point as per the above screen shot When you install/setup a Distibution Point you will have the option of enabling the PXE Service Point Note: You will [...]

Have you ever tried to create a command as a Notification Channel in OpsMgr 2007? – Normally you would expect it to use the Notification Account Profile since this is the account which have been designed for this, and this account is sure doing the job on Instant Messenger and SMTP – But when you configure a Command Channel and run a command; it will run as Local System and as so the computeraccount – So if you try to call a command on another machine like when using Sysman with a modem on another machine – remember to include [...]

When I am developing new script, I usually use VBScript (or powershell but that’s another story).
but sometimes I already have some old functions written in JScript, that I need to use in my VBScript.
This article shows you how to do it.

As you might already know, there are a lot of nice changes in Configuration Manager 2012. As part of a site server installation Configuration Manager will generate a file called ConfigMgrAutoSave.ini and store that in the %temp% folder. This file can be used to perform a scripted installation. If you want to perform a scripted installation perform these steps: Navigate to <ConfigMgr Install source\SMSSetup\Bin\X64\ Type setupwpf.exe /script L:\Labfiles\Install\PS1Script\ConfigMgrAutoSave.ini (Notice that setupwpf.exe will not perform basic checking for .Net those components must be present otherwise it will fail. The scripted installation can also be performed by running setup.exe – thanks Johan). [...]

There is no Configuration Manager toolkit (yet). As with the previous versions of Configuration Manager and SMS you need a good log reader - unless you go the “Wally style” and use Notepad Configuration Manager 2012 Trace32.exe will ship with the product and can be found on the DVD in the Tools folder. Happy reading and look forward to see brand new friends in CM2012 like

Dear Kent Agerlund, Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2011 Microsoft® MVP Award! This award is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with others. We appreciate your outstanding contributions in System Center Configuration Manager technical communities during the past year. And Yes, I know it’s April 1st.